I always wondered if there were jokes about translators, interpreters and linguists in general. Turns out there are quite a few and they are good! I had only heard a few of the ones mentioned below, the rest I discovered during my research for this post.

Do you know any other jokes about translators or interpreters? Please share in the Comments below and have a lovely weekend 🙂

If the translator is a man, HE translates.
If the translator is a woman, SHE translates.
If the translator is a computer, IT translates.
If the translator is either a man or a woman, S/HE translates.
Whether the translator is a man, a woman or a computer, S/H/IT translates.

*************************

Two translators on a ship are talking.
“Can you swim?” asks one.
“No” says the other, “but I can shout for help in nine languages.”

*************************

Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up.
“Parlez-vous français?” the driver asks them. The two workers just stared.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” The two continued to stare at him.
“Fala português?” Neither worker said anything.
“Parlate Italiano?” Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, “Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language…”
“What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?”

*************************

A Spanish speaking bandit held up a bank in Tucson. The sheriff and his deputy chased him. When they captured him, and the sheriff, who couldn’t speak Spanish, asked him where he’d hidden the money. “No sé nada,” he replied.
The sheriff put a gun to the bandit’s head and said to his bi-lingual deputy: “Tell him that if he doesn’t tell us where the money is right now, I’ll blow his brains out.”
Upon receiving the translation, the bandit became very animated. “¡Ya me acuerdo! Tienen que caminar tres cuadras hasta ese gran arbol: allí está el dinero.”
The sheriff leaned forward. “Yeah? Well..?”
The deputy replied: “He says he wants to die like a man.”

*************************

A mouse is in his mouse hole and he wants to go out to get something to eat, but he’s afraid there might be a big cat outside, so he puts his ear by the opening and all he hears is “Bow Wow” so he thinks, “Well, there can’t be a cat out there because there’s a big old dog”, so he goes out of his mouse hole and is promptly caught and eaten by a cat, who licks his lips and says “It’s good to be bilingual !!”

*************************

“I’ve just had the most awful time,” said a boy to his friends. “First I got angina pectoris, then arteriosclerosis. Just as I was recovering, I got psoriasis. They gave me hypodermics, and to top it all, tonsillitis was followed by appendectomy.”
“Wow! How did you pull through?” sympathized his friends.
“I don’t know,” the boy replied. “Toughest spelling test I ever had.”

*************************

The linguist’s husband walked in and caught his wife sleeping with a young co-ed. He said, “Why, Susan, I’m surprised.”
She bolted upright, pointed her finger and corrected him, “No. I am surprised. You are astonished.”

*************************

A former secretary of commerce liked to tell how a high ranking official once responded to a subordinate’s request for a raise by saying, “Because of the fluctuational predisposition of your position’s productive capacity as juxtaposed to governmental statistics, it would be momentarily injudicious to advocate an incremental increase.”
The staff person said, “I don’t get it.”
The official said, “That’s right.”

*************************

How does a freelancer define “weekend”?
Two working days till Monday.

*************************

A cat is sitting on the throne, and two dogs, an envoy and his interpreter, are standing before him. The interpreter dog is whispering to the envoy dog, “You’ll have to rephrase that. Their language doesn’t have a word for ‘fetch'”.

*************************

Q: How many translators does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Depends on the context …

*************************

An English professor complained to the pet shop proprietor, “The parrot I purchased uses improper language.”
“I’m surprised,” said the owner. “I’ve never taught that bird to swear.”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” explained the professor. “But yesterday I heard him split an infinitive.”

*************************

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right.”

*************************

The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: “I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: “I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. “Everyone knows no full-stocked zoo should be without a mongoose,” he typed. “Please send us two of them.”

*************************

A linguist walks in to a doctor’s office and says “Doctor, I have a rash around my mouth”. After close inspection, the doctor says “hmm, looks to me like it’s perioral dermatitis,” to which the linguist replies “yeah, that’s what I said.”

*************************

A teacher asked a particularly dull, lazy and objectionable pupil if he was ignorant or apathetic. The pupil replied: “I don’t know, and I don’t care!”

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right.”

Has to be my favourite!

March 23, 2013 at 01:39

Giovanna Lester (@cariobana)

From a friend a few years ago:

A group of archaeologists was presenting its most recent discovery, a mural with the following symbols in the exact order: the figure of a woman, a donkey, an eye, a fish and a star. The piece had been found on site of a Jewish settlement. The scholars gave their interpretation of the message in the find: “Based on the drawing and their order on the mural, we feel very comfortable saying that this is an evolved society that valued women, domesticated animals, were superstitious, practiced fishing and was also interested in astronomy.”

From the back of the room an old gentleman raises himself and says: “Since this is from Israel and their language is read from left to right, I actually believe the mural represents that people’s sense of humor. It reads ‘Holy mackerel! Look at the a** on that lady!’”

A guy, non English speaker, wanted to spend his honeymoon in London. he was convinced that the English he speaks is enough for that trip.

So, he went to London, and while they were in their hotel room, his wife told him (in their native language) that she saw a rat in the room and he should call the reception. It was a big problem for him to find the right word…. eventually he decided to call the reception:

– The reception, Good morning!
– Hello! do you know Tom and Jerry?
– Yes Sir!
– Jerry is here! come and get it out.

Similar one: Ivo Andric, a Nobel prize winner in literature, wrote a novel “The Bridge on the Drina” (a river in Bosnia and Herzegovina) which used to be every elementary school required reading. When, in a survey on literacy, a Bosnian was asked whether he has read “The Bridge on the Drina”, he replied:
“Read it? I’ve crossed it hundred times!”

A phonetic one -EN ‘dry’ and GER ‘drei’ (3) are homonyms- I’ve heard from a client living in a tripoint between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands:
-Two single German boys cross the border and come to a bar in Netherlands in order to meet girls. As German guys are not popular there, they’ve agreed not to speak German. So, they order: “Two martinis, please!”
“Dry?” – asks the bartender
“Nein, zwei (2)!”
“

April 3, 2013 at 23:47

Giovanna Lester (@cariobana)

Smooth…

April 4, 2013 at 13:16

birgitta

EN ‘dry’ and GER ‘drei’ are homophones, actually. (and heterographs, btw. first i know, but second discovered just from wikipedia. nice couple of words, don’t you think.)

[Allegedly] True Story: An announcement was posted of a Spanish translation of ‘Violators will be fined’. The translation meant, ‘Rapists will be killed’. Whether or not you agree with this idea, the translation was so far off the mark that the signs had to be replaced and the translator was fired – and not from a cannon!

A friend sent me this one, but it’s probably too politically incorrect to get by the censors: A
Polish man came to the USA and married an American woman. Although his English was far from perfect, they got along together very well. One day, he rushed into a lawyer’s office and asked to get a divorce. The lawyer said that this would be difficult, and asked him the following questions:
Lawyer: Have you got any grounds?
Would-Be Divorcé: Yes, an acre and a half and nice little home.
L.: No, I mean what is the foundation of this case?
W.B.D.: It made of concrete.
L.: I don’t think you understand. Does either of you have a real grudge?
W.B.D.: No, we have carport, and not need one.
L.: I mean, what are your relations like?
W.B.D.: All my relations in Poland.
L.: Is there any infidelity in your marriage?
W.B.D.: We have hi-fidelity stereo and good DVD player.
L.: Does your wife beat you up?
W.B.D.: No, I always up before her.
L.: Is your wife a nagger?
W.B.D.: No, she white.
L.: Why do you want this divorce?
W.B.D.: She going to kill me.
L.: What makes you think this?
W.B.D.: I got proof.
L.: What kind of proof?
W.B.D.: She going to poison me. She buy a bottle at drugstore and put on shelf in bathroom. I can read English pretty good, and it says on label: “POLISH REMOVER”!
[As I said, this may never be posted…]

Dear Catherine, Many of the (hilarious) ones you posted can be found in compilations such as Jane O’Boyles “Free Drinks for Ladies with Nuts” or Richard Lederer’s “Anguished English” series. Thanks to all the others who chipped in,we could all use a good guffaw every so often. A few I’ve seen myself here in Paris: “Our Outlandish Beers” (probably via German ‘Auslandisch’); “Pork with Black Fungus (for ‘Mushrooms’)” – at least they didn’t translate ‘porc’ as ‘pig’; “Fish Man Salad”; (…hmmm, has anyone seen Namor lately?); and “Sandwichs on Country Deer” [a puzzler; did a painter ask “Comment dit-on ‘pain’ en anglais?” & whoever heard him misheard ‘pain’ as ‘daim’ & looked that word up in the dictionary?]. But here’s a really side-splitting, gut-busting, thigh-slapping one I just received from a friend:http://dotsub.com/view/6c5d7514-5656-476a-9504-07cc4e2f6509 . Enjoy!

When I was a kid, my Uruguay-born neighbor had a Puerto Rican housekeeper; Spanish was the common language that divided them. My neighbor once accidentally cut herself and said, “I just cut myself! Can you get me a bandaid?” The help freaked out — she’d heard “get me a priest”!